Barista?

The other day I asked some guy what he did for a living, and he replied, "I'm a barista." I starred at him blankly for about 7 seconds and then proceeded to ask him what the hell a barista was. He seemed sort of offended that I had never heard of his profession, but a barista is a person that mans the coffee machine at a coffee shop. Up till now I would have expected someone with that profession to answer my question by telling me that they worked at a coffee shop. Not here. Apparently up in the north west and especially around Seattle coffee is so important that people have invented a word to describe working in a coffee shop.

I'm done bitches!

I'm done with my research 1 week early. Actually I'm really done 2 weeks early. I worked less and finished earlier than any other research student this summer and I'm damn proud of it. Even my poster is done, and it's not due for another 2 months. Now all I have to do is sit back and enjoy the rest of the summer. Oh, and every single summer research student hates my guts now, they're all jealous. No one else will probably finish for another 2 weeks, and that's if they're lucky.

I was driving today

and there was this riced out Honda Civic in front of me at the stop light. For some reason the guy had a mirror the size of his whole sun visor attached to the visor on the passenger side. And for some reason the sun visor was down. (It was 10pm) As a result I could see his girlfriends boobs perfectly. But, this car was equipped with 5-point seatbelts, covering both her boobs perfectly. Maybe this guy put in the mirror on his sunvisor just so that everyone behind him can see his cool seatbelts.

Worthless

This is exactly what I have been at work this summer. If you don't know, I have a research grant at school and it's great. $2500 up front and then $500 when I turn in my poster. With this system, I don't really feel like I've got any responsibilities, such as showing up on time. This past week I have consistently done less than half an hour of actual work every day. (Today was the only exception, I made my entire poster, worth $500, in under 2 hours.) Most other days I'm preoccupied with NPR, the internet, magnetic darts, or going to the farmers market. I don't even show up of leave on time. Compared to other research students I don't even do work. Some work 8 or 9+ hours a day, I on the other hand show up to work at around 11, take a generous 1 hour lunch and leave at around 4, making for a total of 4 hours of "work" a day.
Even though I've enjoyed the super relaxed working atmosphere and the fact that I'm slightly interested in my research, I'm really looking forward to next Friday when it ends. Research is one of those things that isn't hard, but is just annoying and you can't get away from it. I'll be happy when it's over. The one thing that I've learned this summer is that I never want to do research. It's boring. That's why scientists go to exotic locations and use expensive state of the art technology, they try their best to make it fun when it really isn't.
On another note, a young woman was arrested at gun point this morning right in front of our house. According to Drew, it took 5 police cars and 2 armed policemen to arrest this woman who appeared to be our age. All this, 10 feet from our house. I'm willing to bet that there's going to be a shoot out on our corner before we leave in 10 months.

Jump

Me and Ben jumping off a rock. I was scared.

Wasting away

I was listening to NPR the other day. (I probably log 4 hours of that station every day at work.) Someone mentioned that people watch TV because they are not as good as the wish they were at the activities that they are passionate about. This seems to be true, all the basketball players you see at the park probably watched the NBA playoffs, the punk skateboarder next door most likely will watch the X-Games, and women around the world who long for romance in their lives spend their afternoons watching soap operas. According to this, if the amount of television an individual watches is any indication of how much he or she sucks at life, my life is pretty much a complete waste.
However, many would agree that someone who is constantly exposed to the opera, theater, concerts, sporting events, and a wide variety of ideas is cultured. Conveniently all these venues I just mentioned are available through TV. So the more television that I watch, the more cultured I become. Therefore I must be a very well rounded individual. I might even call myself a renaissance man.

More Tacoma Getoness

I was lying in bed at 2:00AM listening to the unusual silence on Union Ave. All of the sudden, I heard a car pull up in front of our house, two doors slam and a bunch of grunting. At the time I was really confused, I mean, none of our neighbors stay up past 10 and the rest of us are in the house, who could it have been? So I peeked through the blinds to get a glimpse of what was happening. Lo and behold there were two people pulling a full sized refrigerator out of the back of their car. These to guys proceeded to carry the refrigerator slowly towards our house. They then disappeared from sight and I heard foot steps coming up our porch. Quickly, I ran down stairs and opened the door just in time to see these people running down the the steps of our porch and back to their car.
This refrigerator is pretty much the most disgusting appliance I have ever encountered. We opened it up for a brief second and the smell hit us like a ton of bricks. What's even worse is that the smell got in our house and lingered for a couple of minutes after. I'm not sure what was in it, but it looked like some milk, spilled all over, and other dairy products. (There's also something that spilled out of the fridge, it looks like a sardine, but flies have been all over it for the past couple days.)
With this fridge in front of our house, there was only one solution. Dump it on school property. The next night we carried out our clandestine mission and moved the large tan colored appliance across the street to school property. (on the way we somehow managed to run over a dead bird, and I believe it was a crow) From this experience I've learned that one, it sucks to live on the corner of a busy street because people automatically think of your house as a dumpster. And two , it's great to live next to school property because we can dump anything there, and it will be gone in under 24 hours. I like to think of it as job security for the for the UPS maintenance workers.
Regarding the people who dumped the fridge on our porch, if you're reading this, thank you so much for thinking of us. But unfortunately we already have one working full size refrigerator and about five smaller ones. None of us living at our house have any clue who you are and which one of us you know. If you didn't do this but maybe know who did, you should let me know because we would love to send our friendly neighbors a thank you note and some cookies for their generosity.

Ghetto

Here are the strange and interesting things that have happened in front of our house recently...
-Fireworks show a couple of houses away
-11 year-old girls trying on the corner trying to pick up guys including Brian Starr
-Homeless guy knocks on our door asking for food and money
-Our landlord dumps human waste on our grass to try and make it grow (smells suspiciously like shit)
-4 cars stop in the intersection at 2:00 in the morning blasting their rap music. The people in the cars get out and proceed to dance for 5 minutes.
-Man pulls in front of our house, puts car in park, pulls out a 40oz, takes swigs for 2 minutes, then drives off
-Some more shady people decide to sit infront of our house and burn rubber for close to a minute.